ABSTRACT
A natural desire to ride all horses at once was characteristic of the north Caucasian chieftains and arose from the political and social circumstances in which they found themselves involved. Comparable dilemmas taxed the ingenuity of the Scottish and Irish chieftains who had to play between the Scottish Stewarts and the English Tudors, and French and Spanish interventionists, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The breakup of the Lordship of the Isles at the end of the fifteenth century may be compared with the disintegration of the Kabardan principality after the death of Temryuk; in the sixteenth century the circumstances of the breakup of the O'Neill rule in Ulster and of the Desmond patrimony in Munster presented similar phenomena. In fact, the very complex and antique clan systems could not sustain the pressures of developing bureaucratic states nor even of feudal monarchies.
